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Comment by zb1plus | Hacker News Reader

The further I go into my career, the more see the it the opposite way. I think business people are overvalued compared with most software engineers. If software engineers take the time to learn the "business", they can build their own companies that eclipse those started by the typical MBAs who view engineers as "pampered and coddled" cost centers. I think after the bubble pops, we'll see new companies that led by engineers and creatives conducting orchestras of AI that will allow them end the need for the typical corporate business people.

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I hope you are right, and I think looking at the past there is some truth to this. After the dotcom bubble burst and the 2008 crash, those are the times when a lot of strong engineering-focused tech companies were started.

Funny, when I was a software developer I thought the same thing.

While there have been a few developers I have worked with who were total stars, most of them were distinctly average (unsurprisingly) and lacked basic curiosity. Even of the great developers, there are very few I would trust to do anything other than write software.

The other thing I have noted over my career is how developers consistently underrate the skills, experience and intelligence of non developers.

> and lacked basic curiosity

This is an incredible take, and I have no idea where you have seen this, as it's entirely counter to my own personal experience. I have never, in my life, met a finance bro or management bro who had any non-work curiosity about anything beyond sports, cars, and sex.

Most engineers I know are immensely curious about how the world works, how the universe works, etc, and are constantly trying to learn and understand.

The “just tell me what to build, I don’t need to understand why” trope exists for a reason.

I’ve worked with a range of engineers in terms of their curiosity. In my experience, the ones who cared enough to ask or push back on decisions were exceptions, not the rule.

This doesn’t mean they weren’t curious people. It just means they weren’t curious about The BusinessTM or The MarketTM.

> “just tell me what to build, I don’t need to understand why”

I suspect that insofar as this exists, it's because when junior engineers question the utility of the requirements or user stories, they are told specifically to stfu because nerds don't understand business. Over time, the message get received?

That said, I've very rarely seen an engineer like this. In fact, I frequently encounter the opposite: the sterotypical asperger's who doesn't know when they're being rude with their probing.

As long as those engineers are willing to do mostly sales and marketing, I would agree with you.

Otherwise probably not, sadly.

It's not that skills prevents starting a company, it's the amount of risk & uncertainty people are happy to live with. Programmers like predictability because what you'd do if your compiler gave a different result every time you compile your code?

A rational person getting a 300K salary would be better off on average than a small business owner after 5 years.

Sales people are paid a high percentage of the deal they close because they need to produce a consistent result in inconsistent environment. Also businesses can easily measure the output of a sales person, but it's way harder to measure a programmers output in a larger team.

> what you'd do if your compiler gave a different result every time you compile your code?

Start calling their job Prompt Engineering.

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